The End of Days (5 page)

Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck

Her husband has known for a year and a half what comes after
death, and soon she will, too. Her daughter, on the other hand — although
she’s been a widow longer — has a good part of her path still before her.
Keeping the shop is a struggle. What will become of her granddaughter when she is
all alone in the world someday?

Two ships lie in the harbor.
She holds her ears with their
sagging lobes close to her husband’s mouth — his whisper is so soft, she can
scarcely hear the rest of the story, but she herself has read it often.
One of
the two ships has just returned from a long voyage, the other is just preparing
for a long voyage.
She tries to give her husband — for whom speaking
is an exertion — something to drink, but he refuses to swallow, and so the
water runs down his stubbly chin onto the pillow.

Jubilation and blessings accompany the ship as it sails off —
while the arriving ship goes unremarked. But is it not this ship that deserves
jubilation?

What a shame that she was able to raise only the one daughter with him.
Two other children died shortly after birth. When on some evenings she wept over the
ones that had died, he would sit down beside her with a nod.

The newly arrived ship lies safely in the harbor. But nothing is
known of the one just setting sail. What will be its fate? Who knows whether it
will successfully withstand the storms awaiting it?

Her daughter recently remarked that perhaps it would make more sense to
close the store and rent out part of the apartment instead.

Or would you rather have some soup? she asks him.

The pillow is still damp with the water she tried to give him when he
stops being able to breathe.

The shopkeeper can still clearly remember the day the goy first
came into the shop and saw her daughter, who had just turned sixteen. Since he
displayed serious interest, she summoned him not long afterward to have tea with her
in their apartment while the girl was at school. She showed him the living room and
the bookcase with Goethe’s
Collected Works
, spoke of the dowry, and finally
even brought him into her daughter’s room, where the dress the girl had worn the day
before was still draped over the back of the big armchair, one of the shoes beside
it had fallen over, and the housecat lay curled up on the bed, asleep.

I’m sure you realize we are of Jewish descent.

Yes, I know.

There’s still time for you to turn back.

She had sold many a bit of merchandise in her life. She knew when it was
too late for a customer to walk away from the deal. The more freedom you gave him to
choose, the more likely he was to choose exactly what he was supposed to.

What are you saying?

For a while both of them remained standing beside the bed of the absent
girl, looking at the cat, which, from time to time, extended its claws in a dream
and then pulled them back in again beneath the fur.

That morning, for the sake of her daughter’s happiness, she
had sold her daughter’s happiness. Sometimes the price one pays for something
continues to grow after the fact, becoming too expensive long after it has been
paid. A transaction like this is a living equilibrium, she’s grasped this in the
course of the three years since her son-in-law’s disappearance. Profit and loss must
avail themselves of a salesman if they are to work together, but fundamentally their
dealings are with one another; at some point they balance each other out again. In
the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand
that someone is holding out. A man wanting to deliver a letter on Shabbat is not
permitted to, according to the Talmud, because that would be work. It would be work
to walk from the street into a building, in other words mixing indoors and outdoors.
On Shabbat people are to rest, and the three spaces — Outside, Inside,
Wilderness — are to be kept separate from each other. But if the messenger
walks up to the recipient’s window opening onto the street and lets the letter fall
into the recipient’s hand, the messenger would not be leaving his space — the
street — and the recipient would be remaining in his own — the building;
what’s more, the dropping of the letter would not be a giving, nor would its receipt
in the open hand be a taking. How heatedly she and her husband had debated with her
parents about how the Talmud pointed the way here to deceit, to the violation of the
rules that were supposed to be its jurisdiction. Her father said it was a matter of
how the boundaries were defined, that it wasn’t possible to comply with a
prohibition unless you knew exactly where it started and ended. In any case, it
wasn’t a parable, her husband had said, but rather in the end pure mathematics. Her
mother had laughed and opined: thank goodness it was a letter the messenger was
dropping and not an egg. She herself had declared the messenger’s hesitation
pedantic, making her father smile at her indignation, saying: you don’t understand
what’s meant. At the time she didn’t want to understand what was meant, her father
was still alive, and as long as that was the case she — even as a grown woman
— was the one permitted to be in error. In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a
letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out.

How happy a person must be, she’s come to think — now
that twenty years have passed since her husband’s fatal beating, three since her
daughter’s abandonment, one and a half since her father’s death and burial —
how happy a person must be who can manage to comport himself as impassively as the
messenger in this story, simply letting things happen as they will and nonetheless
delivering what has been entrusted to him. When in her home she finds traces of dirt
on a knife that her elderly mother has cleaned, she feels only disgust. Her
daughter, on the other hand, moves so lethargically about the shop that she often
feels an impulse to drag her by the hair back to work. But she observes even her own
body with impatience as it struggles to hoist the ten-kilogram sacks of flour onto
the cart, and the farmers who sometimes help her and sometimes don’t are called
Marek, Krzystof, or often — hearing the name is still difficult for her
— Andrei.

So what began with the hands is now ending with the hands. Should
she perhaps give a present to the man who thought she was for sale? Certainly not,
she thinks, and, after he’s gone, she takes the money from the chest of drawers,
leaves the room, goes downstairs, out of the building (which looks no different from
others), and onto the street. She gives the money to the first beggar woman she sees
squatting beside the road, and for two days afterward life really does look just the
same as before. But on the third day, a Sunday, the officer comes into the shop
again as if nothing ever happened, he wants to buy matches, he says, the same as
always, in the back room her mother is wrapping merchandise in newsprint, it
rustles, then he reaches across the counter to grab his recent lover by the chin,
forcing her to look him in the eye and says, not even lowering his voice, he has a
friend who would also be interested.

Rustling newspaper.

The day, the time, the building that looks like any other.

Rustling newspaper.

If she doesn’t want anyone to hear of this, he says, she should keep the
appointment.

Silence.

Child, can you give me a hand here?

Yes, Mother.

Admit it, you enjoyed it too.

What a disaster — child, where are you? My hand’s about to fall
off.

Coming!

After the inspection of the immigrating flesh, the mind, too, is
checked; man, woman, and child must answer thirty questions, and only persons giving
acceptable answers will be allowed to cross over to the mainland. Madness,
melancholia, anarchism — all these and others like them will be rejected. Were
you ever in prison? Do you practice polygamy? In his now rumpled coat, the Austrian
asks himself whether in America, as a result of this strict examination at the
border, there are no longer deficiencies of any sort, no longer any cripples or
incurable diseases, no madness, no insubordination, perhaps even no death?

So that’s how it was when you fell off the edge of the
palatschinke
, a grain of sugar, and disappeared. Already after her
second customer she started using the money to buy something for herself, a pair of
stockings, after all it was her own body she was offering up for sale. After the
third, a scarf — leave the curtains open, I want to look at you — after
the fourth — listen, can’t you struggle a little — and the fifth —
bring your mouth here — and the sixth — you Jewish sow: four, five, and
six together, a new pair of shoes. It hurt, it disgusted her, it was ludicrous,
sometimes her skin felt like it was cracking open in delicate spots and burning, but
bit by bit taking leave of her senses became her job. Now she knew what the men were
hiding from their families, and the ones she ran into on the street wearing their
uniforms, or in top hats, or work smocks — never again was she able to see
them as anything other than what they all finally were: naked. What she could buy
with the money she earned in this way — considering that she would never again
be at one with any person in the world, not even with herself — was absurdly
little. But the less a dress, a hat, or piece of jewelry stood in any sort of
relationship to what she was giving of herself, the easier it became for her to sell
herself the next time. Eventually her true worth, which now only she would know,
would be impossible to measure.
How delightful the gods find these penitent
sinners; / lifting prodigal children in arms made of fire / with jubilant cries
up to Heaven above.
Her mother never asked where all the new things she
wore came from, but even without being asked, she told her she had found the shoes
for a good price here or there, already used, or that a girlfriend had given her one
or the other trinket, that she found the ring in the street. Hadn’t her mother also
lied to her about the death of her father throughout her childhood and youth?

Waiting for the results of the examination, a thousand or two
thousand people sit in the gloomy light of the great hall, and new ones are
constantly coming to join them. These people squat, lie on the ground, or sit on
benches: people with bundles, bedding, and crates, with samovars, people without any
baggage at all, children running about, crying babies, people who have lain down on
the floor and gone to sleep, people with frail parents, people who understand not a
word of English, people who don’t know whether the person who’s supposed to pick
them up here is really coming, people who are filled with hope, with despair, people
who are homesick, frightened, people who don’t know what’s in store for them, people
who are wondering where they’ll find the twenty-five dollars for their immigration
fee, people who suddenly want to go back, or who are just glad that the ground
beneath their feet is no longer swaying, people with long or short pants, with
headscarves, skirts, suits, hats, with fringe, shoes, or slippers, gloves or cuffs,
with braids, beards, mustaches, curls, parted hair, people with many, few, or no
children — countless people, all of whom are waiting for the moment when
eventually their names will be called and they will learn whether they are allowed
to stay or will be sent back to Europe. The young man, who is also one of those
waiting, thinks: This is probably more or less the way it’s going to be one day at
the Last Judgment.

And then, suddenly, a loud clattering and jangling fills the hall;
everyone falls silent for a moment, looks over, and sees a large Chinese vase lying
shattered on the ground — a girl has dropped it in one of the very few places
in the hall not covered with people or clothes or bundles, but only with stone
tiles, she has dropped this vase that she carried in her arms ever since her
departure from a small town outside Bucharest or Warsaw, or outside Vienna or Odessa
or Athens or Paris — all the long way via Bremen, Antwerp, Danzig, Marseille,
Piraeus, or Barcelona: The vase has shattered into bits here in the arrival hall,
the final stop before New York, for the girl has just — for the first time in
her life — seen a man with dark skin, who happened to be walking across the
room with a broom in his hand, and she must have thought it was the Devil. The
girl’s mother now looks as if she would like best to strike her child dead, and the
girl looks as though she wishes she were dead. Then the noise recommences —
the crying, talking, and shouting — the children go back to running around,
the adults wait, and a boy, having been given an ice cream by a relative who got
permission to visit him, places the ice cream on the bench, and there it melts,
because the boy doesn’t know what ice cream is.

Hey look, the inspector wrote a letter on your back in chalk —
mine too?

The boy turns his back to his friend so he can see whether he too has a
mark on him, one that may possibly decide if he will be permitted to stay or be sent
back to Europe.

No, there’s nothing on your back.

What sort of letter is it, do you think?

Dunno.

So do I have to go back now, or do you?

No idea.

Two little girls are crouching on the floor.

I’m thirsty.

Grandmother says that when you get to Battery Park, there are a lot of
fountains there.

Good, I’ll have a drink then.

No, you mustn’t drink, whatever happens.

How come?

She says that then you’ll forget everything you ever knew about where
you come from.